The Old Hemisphere

This is one of those ones that's going to take me like three strips before I get to the point. But it's okay! I like where it's going. Plus there's a vague attempt at a calculus joke "hidden" in Brock's conversation with someone off-panel. Pretend it's Ike.

Anyway. Of note in this strip: tesseract gravity, by which I mean things stick to whichever surface they're nearest, makes itself evident for the third time in Polytopes, the other two instances occurring in strips twenty-two and four. There's an obvious use of the "totally subjective" variation in strip twelve, as well. This is one of the things that tickles me about doing Polytopes. Inconsistently subjective gravity is perfectly acceptable. How can you not love that?

While we're on the subject of inconsistency, take a look at Ninja-ing to Do: note the brown floor, red walls, and pale backdrop, with the door leading to Otto's room giving a view of the purple wall therein. Today's strip is in the same room, just facing a different direction: pale floor, brown walls, and red backdrop, and now the door shows us the blue wall of Otto's room. This would be patently impossible in any conventional, static shape, no matter how many dimensions you--well, okay, let's not go there. Pretty much everyone was sure that regular eleven-sided polytopes were impossible until we went 4-D to find the hendecatope.

In four dimensions, anyway, that kind of shifting and switching just doesn't happen on its own. Luckily, Tess is a living and volitional entity, which allows for all kinds of control over her faces, vertices, and what have you. Although we have to cut the discussion now, before it ventures into the vaguely pornographic.